Excuse Me, I Think I Just Re-Blogged

Well…as you can see, this is yet another incarnation of my blogging mind.

A few years ago, Finn* asked me why I didn’t blog.  I said that I really didn’t have anything to say.  Now, with some time and several hundred blog entries in the book, I think it’s safe to say that while I might not have anything to say, I’m clearly not afraid to say it.

I made a few testing-the-water attempts at blogging after Finn’s suggestion. At the time, what little blogging software there was available—if you were generous enough to call it that—was very primitive. Because of work, and not knowing what to do with the sites I was building, they didn’t really go very far.

So “Op-Ed” became “The Sanctorum Effluvium” to little effect. Then I realized: I didn’t have to have a single point of view; I could take all of my ideas and put them into one site, and thus “Ellipses…” was born. It was a place I could go to and just spout off on whatever was on my mind. After a while, I realized that I still also wanted to have a more traditional, personal blog. With an eye to doing something a little less commercial than “Ellipses…”, I created “CJ’s Mind Garden” to cover those things that were going on in my life.

As the time and passed and the posts have built up, I’ve found that I simply don’t have the time or inclination to constantly be tending to updating the software on several sites as well as keeping the various contents artificially segregated.  Clearly, it was time to build my words a new home.

When I first began trying to blog, I wrote all of my software from scratch.  That was fun (he said sarcastically). When I stumbled upon WordPress, it seemed to make things much easier…and thus “Ellipses…” got started.  Unfortunately, the creative geek in me wanted more than WordPress was willing to give me at the time.  So, after A LOT of try-outs, I choose the CMS (Content Management System), Joomla, as the framework upon which to build my site.  I have to say, Joomla has served me well over the years, both personally and professionally.  Thing is, as I’ve gotten more comfortable with the blogging, and with life being somewhat time-sapping, maintaining Joomla wasn’t something that I wanted to spend my time doing.  And since a major upgrade just came out, I’d have to think about migrating over to that version.

Last week, I decided that if I was going to have to migrate my databases over in any case, I might as well see how the blogging software landscape has changed.  WordPress, it seems, is now at a place where I’m happy that it can do for me what I want it to. It was a no-brainer to give it a quick test.  A few days later I found myself moving over all of my databases to my newly designed site.  And now…here we are.

Since I made it so amazingly obvious in the header, “T I B” stands for “…Therefore, I Blog”. See, the thing is that I kept bouncing around with various takes on that: I think…therefore, I blog; I write…therefore, I blog; I spew…therefore, I blog; and so forth for over a dozen choices.  I decided that if I instead chose the common aspect of all of those: “…therefore, I blog”, then I might have something.  And thus, this site is now “T I B” (or “TIB”…whatever).

I hope you find your time here a pleasant one.  Obviously I’ll be making modifications as the site settles in, but for now it seems to be doing OK.  I encourage you to look around at the old posts.  Of course I encourage all y’all to come back often and see what’s new, or you can subscribe to the RSS feed and get updated in your Reader as I come up with new things.  I’m hoping to make the site more interactive than in the past, so feel free to post comments when the mood strikes. You can agree, disagree, support, come up with something new…whatever. I will be moderating comments which start veering too far from civil discourse, though, so keep it at least PG-13 most of the time, OK?

So enjoy, and if your brains explode you’ll have to clean up the mess yourself. :-)